In Conway's Life, Fifteen Gliders Can Build Anything

b3s23life.blogspot.com

7 points·OscarCunningham··4 comments

The amount of hacking that was spawned by Life, chess (and checkers), 4x4x4 tic tac toe, star trek and colossal cave was impressive. Make it go. Make it go faster. Add neat features. Deal with memory limits. Check out odd 360 assembler instructions. Wonderful time. Given that the machines were immense, it was a social time. And to get a game to play, you had to write it, key it in or know somebody who did.

Hopefully, there’s some remnant of that time buried deep in the social media and internet seas. Perhaps in the FOSS culture? Cuz it’s certainly not in user space. But it never was in user space.

The Life Wiki referenced in the article strongly implies that indeed some remnant of that time lived in the Life subculture. Incredible rabbit hole, that wiki.

Yes, we live on the forum https://conwaylife.com/forums/ and the Discord https://discord.gg/BCuYCEn.

For about twenty years, 1992 through 2012 or so, there was an invite-only "LifeCA" Conway's Life mailing list where a lot of the in-depth research and collaboration tended to happen. That was certainly a good surviving pocket of Life-hacker subculture.

The point of keeping the LifeCA list private was to dodge spammers and keep the signal-to-noise ratio high. This very successfully avoided the terrible drowned-in-spam fate of the Usenet group comp.theory.cell-automata, so that was good -- but it made it quite difficult for newcomers to figure out who to talk to, or what interesting problems had been solved or were still open.

When the conwaylife.com forums showed up in 2009, it turned out that there were much better ways of suppressing spam, and a lot of new energy entered the field.

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